For self-made artist and soldier Horace Pippin — His ability to transform combat service into canvases of emotive power, psychological depth, and realism showed not only how he viewed the world but also his mastery as a painter. In Suffering and Sunset, Celeste-Marie Bernier painstakingly traces Pippin’s life story of art as a life story of war.

Illustrated with more than sixty photographs, including works in various mediums—many in full color—this is the first intellectual history and cultural biography of Pippin, a pioneering African American artist who served in the 369th all-black infantry in World War I until he was wounded. The war defined much of his life and work. The Great War, Pippin wrote, ‘brought out all the art in me.’ Working from newly discovered archives and unpublished materials, Bernier provides an in-depth investigation into the artist’s development of an alternative visual and textual lexicon and sheds light on his work in its aesthetic, social, and political contexts.

Celeste-Marie Bernier was a Visiting Professor in Oxford in 2013 at the RAI and at Wolfson.​ ​S​he has since held appointments at Harvard, Memphis and King’s College, London.